With Microsoft beginning to integrate advanced AI technology and language models from ChatGPT creator OpenAI throughout its product portfolio–and other software providers leveraging OpenAI’s API–IT professionals should develop a strategy to deploy and govern this emerging technology.
This comes as Microsoft and Google begin to compete on the public stage in the field of AI, with Google recently announcing its own chatbot, Bard, powered by Google’s own large language model. With those two giant providers of enterprise technology seemingly laser-focused on innovating in the AI space, organizations should know have a plan.
How IT should manage the use of ChatGPT
Fresh on the heels of Microsoft announcing the integration of a more advanced ChatGPT model with search engine Bing, Jason Wong, a distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner, says the firm is advising organizations to think ahead. CIOs and CTOs, along with digital and AI leaders, should form a center of excellence to bring together the activities using the technology to better understand the collective impact.
As with any new disruptive technology in business, enterprise IT leaders should actively monitor its usage and have an open dialogue with business partners, rather than simply denying users the use of the technology outright, Wong adds.
In addition, this can help organizations set standards and policies for consistency and risk mitigation, Wong says.
“IT leaders will also need to identify patterns of usage and assess emerging use cases from outside the company to understand how to incorporate leading practices—rather than just look inward,” Wong adds.
Read More: ChatGPT and Why it Matters to IT Professionals
However, ChatGPT–and Microsoft’s preview of its new OpenAI-powered Bing, have been extremely popular. ChatGPT has reportedly set the record for the fastest-growing user base, already reaching 100 million monthly active users last month.
The new Bing, which Microsoft made available last week via a preview–for which there is a lengthy waitlist–saw more than 1 million people join the waitlist for the preview in less than two days.
Wong poses this question: “Will employees be distracted be the novelty of the technology or abuse it is some way to cause risk and compliance issues for the organization?’
We also asked both ChatGPT and the new Bing the same question. For what it’s worth, here is how each responded.
ChatGPT:
IT professionals can manage the use of ChatGPT by implementing the following guidelines:
- Establish clear guidelines: IT professionals should establish clear guidelines for the use of ChatGPT in the workplace, including guidelines on when and how ChatGPT can be used.
- Monitor usage: IT professionals should monitor the usage of ChatGPT to ensure that it is being used appropriately and in line with the established guidelines.
- Implement security measures: IT professionals should implement appropriate security measures to protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access to ChatGPT.
- Train employees: IT professionals should provide training to employees on how to use ChatGPT and how to follow the established guidelines.
- Regularly review and update guidelines: IT professionals should regularly review and update the guidelines for ChatGPT usage to ensure that they remain relevant and effective.
By following these guidelines, IT professionals can effectively manage the use of ChatGPT in the workplace and ensure that it is being used in a way that is productive, secure, and aligned with the needs of the organization.
Bing (with citations):
That’s a good question. ChatGPT and similar AI models are powerful tools that can generate text that is coherent, consistent, and human-like, but they also pose potential risks for data security, privacy, and ethics12. IT professionals should manage the use of these models carefully and follow some best practices, such as:
- Assessing their IT infrastructure and ensuring it is compatible with AI deployment34.
- Defining clear goals and use cases for AI adoption and aligning them with business objectives34.
- Choosing the right AI models and services for their specific tasks and domains, and fine-tuning them if needed56.
- Screening the data they use to train or interact with AI models, and testing multiple hypotheses, validating models, and monitoring them over time for bias and fairness78.
- Following the principles of responsible AI, such as accountability, inclusiveness, reliability and safety, transparency, and privacy and security9.
- Educating their staff and stakeholders about the benefits and limitations of AI, as well as their roles and responsibilities in using it34.
These are some of the best practices that can help IT professionals manage the use of ChatGPT and similar AI models effectively.
The risks of generative AI in enterprise IT
Early use cases for ChatGPT and the new Bing include content creation, but also more technical applications such as code development, checking for security vulnerabilities in code, and creating scripts to automate processes. Nearly all workers could benefit from a better conversational interface to their applications, data and content, but risk and abuse are a threat, Wong says.
For IT use cases, Wong says some Gartner clients are already asking about how to write policies about proper use of ChatGPT, and many of them are posing that same question to the generative AI chatbot.
Read Next: NIST: Here’s How to Deploy and Use AI Systems
While some anecdotal early use cases include reviewing code for vulnerabilities, cybersecurity firm NCC is warning to not use ChatGPT for that function.
In the blog, researchers say they gave ChatGPT code with clear vulnerabilities, and while the chatbot gave several compelling narratives about security bugs in the code–including some very accurate responses–it wasn’t perfect.
“The output might be useful to a reviewer, simply because it provides a nicely formatted block of text and some filler – it might allow a human reviewer to compose the description quicker, but only if that reviewer is knowledgeable enough to remove the inaccuracies,” researchers write in the blog.
ChatGPT-like AI is coming to enterprise IT tools
However, products with ChatGPT and other OpenAI models are hitting the market, and not just at Microsoft. IT management software provider Atera, among others, is launching an integration with OpenAI designed to allow enterprise IT administrators to create scripts to help automate tasks.
The integration will be launching in limited beta and focus on script generating capabilities. The company is offering early access to the capability here.
Over a Zoom call, Tal Dagan, the company’s chief product officer, displayed how seemingly simple the script-generating tool was to use. In the platform, an IT admin can use a chat feature to ask for a script for a certain function.
Using the too, Dagan asked the ChatGPT-integrated tool to write a code that would create a restore point for a user’s computer. Adding to it, Dagan asked the tool to then create a script that would reboot from that restore point. While that addition took a minute of some trial and error, a useful script was eventually generated. The copmany is also working on additional use cases for the integration to help automate other functions of an IT professional’s job.
However, this technology is not intended to replace workers, Dagan insists. Instead, generative AI is very useful as an assistant that can quickly generate code or a script for professionals to review and quality check for accuracy.
“It’s not replacing you,” Dagan says, “but it can speed up the process.”
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